Meet Rumr, the latest “anonymish” app

Rumr, an anonymous group chat app, officially launched today on iOS and Android. But much like the buzzy anonymous social network Secret, Rumr isn’t exactly anonymous — it’s a real-time group chat among friends, in which participants are assigned colors instead of displaying names. Whoever starts the chat knows who’s in the chat, just not exactly who is saying what.

As co-founder James Jerlecki puts it, Rumr works on a “sliding scale of anonymity.” The more people in the chat, the more anonymous the chat becomes.

Jerlecki and co-founder Andrew Chae, both veterans of the free texting app textPlus, envisioned adding “context” to the anonymous app space — they wanted more than a one-way platform for venting or gossip.

“What’s missing in anonymity has always been context,” he said. “I knew there had to be a better way for people to connect with their friends.”

Jerlecki imagines that a cloak of anonymity within a circle of friends will free up the conversation for a more honest, heartfelt dialogue.

“As a guy, expressing emotion with your friends is kind of difficult,” he said, as one example. But within an anonymous chat, a group of guys might be more willing to open up.

Likewise, he thinks anonymous chat could be a good problem solving tool. For instance, what if a group of colleagues could have conversations about work culture and provide feedback openly but also anonymously. (That question, by the way, was what first spurred Secret co-founder David Byttow to begin developing an anonymous app.)

A screenshot of Rumr for iOS. (Image courtesy Rumr.)

Back in November, Rumr raised an $800,000 seed round from major investors including Ben Ling of Khosla Ventures, angel investor Paige Craig and Google Ventures (which also invested in Secret).

Unlike most players in the quickly growing anonymous app space, Rumr is already thinking up ways the app could be monetized. When a new person enters a chat, for example, the colors assigned to each individual chatter are shuffled, so as to better preserve anonymity. Perhaps users could pay to randomly shuffle the colors at other points in a conversation or even pay to chose what color represents them in the first place. At the moment, said Jerlecki, there are no plans to incorporate advertising into the app.

But the big risk of anonymity is always how the product is used once it’s in the hands of consumers.

PostSecret, a website that began in 2005 with confessional snail-mail postcards, ran in to troubles with anonymity when it expanded to include an app, which was canned in 2012 due to difficulty managing it. Ask.fm, a website where people can ask one another questions, often anonymously, recently came under fire after a British teen who had been bullied on the site committed suicide. Secret was envisioned as a safe space to share things you might not want to on Facebook or Twitter, but it has become in large part an outlet for Silicon Valley gossip. When it first launched, it was plagued by Secrets targeting Path founder David Morin and a false rumor that Evernote was about to be acquired.

Rumr takes things a step further, by putting people who know each other in direct, real-time communication with one another. Especially in the hands of teens, that could easily lead to bullying and harassment.

Jerlecki said that for any anonymous app, “a lot of it will come down to how to create a safe space.”

In Rumr, there are already some protections in place. The initiator of a chat, for instance, can kick anyone out of a chat group. More safeguards will likely come as the app evolves.

Jerlecki, though, hopes that consumers will use the app the way it is envisioned. He chose a toothy cartoon panda for the logo because it’s “playful.” Same goes for the site name, and slogan, which is “turn out the lights.”

The idea of a rumor, he said, “doesn’t necessarily have to be negative.”

Sometimes, though, it can be hard to control what goes on in the dark.